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Topic: Bollywood

Charles Everett
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1470
From: New Jersey
Registered: May 2001

posted 08-23-2002 11:47 AM

That "little softball game" in Lagaan is a cricket match.

Last year K3G (Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham) reportedly grossed enough to make the US top 10 the weekend after Thanksgiving. However, EDI did not consider the numbers reliable and excluded K3G from the list.

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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001

posted 08-23-2002 06:27 PM

<<Bollywood films don't even pretend that the actors do their own singing. In their version of the Academy Awards, they actually have nominations for best song dubber, or something to that effect.>>

They call that "looping", where the voice actor or singer sits at a console and the scene is run shot by shot in closed film loops while the actor or singer records into a microphone over and over, the sound editor selecting the best takes and assembling the whole.
Looping singers and actors often never appear on screen during their entire careers--like some who used to do voices for animated films in the U.S. In India, the female relatives of the famous cinema singer Lota Mangeshka dominated looping for decades.

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Mike Blakesley
Film God

Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99

posted 08-24-2002 01:36 PM

Along the same line, what exactly is the difference between anime and animated? At the end of the day, as Dave Letterman would say, "It's a cartoon!"

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 08-24-2002 03:09 PM

Anime just refers to Japanese animation. Any other use of the term is incorrect. Disney cartoons are not anime.

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Leo Enticknap
Film God

Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000

posted 08-24-2002 03:27 PM

I think there's probably a bit more of a culture gap to contend with than those who market Bollywood features in the West are willing to admit. A couple of years ago I saw Bombay with a couple of Indians, and was struck by a number of things: the film integrated a boy-meets-girl melodrama narrative with a political undercurrent about tensions between Hindus and Muslims and some choreographed musical numbers that seemed to have been done in a Busby Berkeley style.

My Indian friends told me that it was not at all unusual or remarkable to have a Bollywood film which dealt with some very serious issues of racial tension but interspersed musical numbers 'for light relief'. I can see the logic of this in a way, but it's not something that Western film-makers would normally do at all. They also pointed out that the Indian film-makers that have become very popular with Western arthouse audiences - e.g. Satyajit Ray or Mira Nair - never achieved real success in India itself.

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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001

posted 08-24-2002 04:15 PM

On a visit to Bombay in the 60's, a filmmaker from NY and I took a train to the big studios outside Bombay, where we were approached by a cigar-smoking "middleman" dressed in plaids like a Bollywood comedian. He offered us a peek inside the studio. We soon found ourselves in the dressing room of Sharmila Tagore, actress and relative (niece?) of Rabindranath Tagore, the prolific poet and songwriter of Bengal. As she attended to her makeup, I asked about her work with Satyajit Ray (called Roy in India) in his Apu trilogy.
With self-effacing acceptance she related her diminished role in the
much less artistic movies she was then making.

In discussians I learned that most Indians did not like the films of Ray. "That's realism, not entertainment. Indians see too much of reality every day. Movies exist for fantasy relief; for entertainment."

From a family attempting to market their amaturish film in the US,
a totally unrealistic drama of self-sacrifice interspersed with the required songs, dances and comedy routines, I learned their view of cinema: "The purpose of Indian films is to show the virtu of the Indian woman."

And in a Bombay tin-roofed shed with earthen floors, a group of men proudly showed us, on a rusty old Moviola with a 5"x7" screen, a dissolve in black & white of a gossamer-clad goddess arising and dancing in a garden-of-Eden setting. This film clip, reminiscent of Melies, was their achievement of several days working from a Hindu literary classic--the birth of the virtuous Indian goddess.

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Charles Everett
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1470
From: New Jersey
Registered: May 2001

posted 09-26-2002 04:12 PM

Joe R's suspicions about Bollywood must be true. Even a few India-based filmmakers are now accusing Bollywood of ripping off Hollywood.

Then again, one of these Bollywood ripoffs is playing 2 Regal megaplexes and an ex-Regal multiplex in New Jersey this week.

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Gerard S. Cohen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 975
From: Forest Hills, NY, USA
Registered: Sep 2001

posted 09-26-2002 04:40 PM

Remaking a Hollywood story is one form of imitation, but what about incorporating entire scenes of actual footage?

The blockbuster film GOA, about the takeover of a colonial port city
from foreign administration, incorporated scenes of a stampede of horses from a US western, and documentary footage from WWII (probably
the D-Day assault on Normandy.) Actually, Goa was taken without firing a shot. Probably the director would say these scenes were to provide emotional impact, but this mish-mash of a film was hailed by public and reviewers alike as a modern masterpiece.

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Joseph Pandolfi
Expert Film Handler

Posts: 213
From: Milford, CT.
Registered: Nov 1999

posted 09-28-2002 09:56 AM

We ran a Bollywood release not long ago called "DevDas" it came on two burlap boxes which had 19 ten minute reels and it ran just over three hours. It also had two ads for Bollywood video just before the feature started.

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Joe Redifer
You need a beating today

Posts: 12859
From: Denver, Colorado
Registered: May 99

posted 09-28-2002 04:40 PM

I ran Devdas. It wasn't shipped on cores or even reels. Fun. They must not have that technology yet over there (forgive me if I've already whined about this). The commercials attached to the front of the movie and after the intermission are pretty weird.

Oh, and Bollywood LOVES negative dirt!

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Charles Everett
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1470
From: New Jersey
Registered: May 2001

posted 07-01-2003 02:14 PM

MPKDH (Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon) opened last weekend and brought in $672K+ from 60 US sites per Mojo. The per-theater average was better than that of Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle -- and the running length is twice as long.

Could a US-based arthouse imprint think about picking up MPKDH? (Title translates to "I Will Love Him Until the End of Time".)

Also, I'm now seeing references to Mollywood as well as Bollywood.

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